Recently, a user on the MSDN forums asked how to check an Agent job from SSIS to see if it’s completed. Once it had completed, additional steps need to be performed, for example, archiving flat files. However, this couldn’t be done till the job completed. Fortunately, this isn’t too difficult to accomplish in SSIS.
I put together the following sample package to illustrate this. Basically, the package starts a job, then goes into a loop to see if the package has completed.
The Start Job Execute SQL Task uses the sp_start_job stored procedure to start an Agent job. sp_start_job is asynchronous, that it, it does not wait for the job to complete, but returns right away. This sample is just running a job that pauses execution for several seconds before completing.
The For Loop container is configured to look at the @executionStatus variable. The initial expression (InitExpression) sets the value of the variable to 1 at the beginning of the loop. The loop will continue executing until the EvalExpression is false, in this case when @executionStatus is no longer equal to 1.
The first step inside the loop is to delay for a second. This allows the job to get started initially, and prevents the package from bombarding the server with requests. The delay is implemented using a WAITFOR statement in the Execute SQL Task.
Finally, another Execute SQL Task is used to check the current status of the job. This is done by calling sp_help_job, which returns, among other things, the current_execution_status column. The value in this column indicates what the job is doing currently. 1 indicates that it is currently executing, so when the value is no longer 1, it’s time to exit the loop. The value of the current_execution_status column is assigned to the @executionStatus variable, and the loop repeats as long as the value is 1.
This is the Result Set page, where the column is assigned to the variable.
As I mentioned, this is fairly straightforward to implement. The one wrinkle I found is that you do need some amount of delay between calling sp_start_job and checking the execution status. If you do it immediately, it’s likely that the job hasn’t started yet, and the loop will exit immediately. On my system, introducing the 1 second delay gave the job time to actually get started. Also, you’ll need to alter the Agent job being called to match your system.
The sample package is on my Skydrive. Let me know if you have questions or feedback.